The Polish zloty at three-month lows as NBP hawks indicate that more easing will inevitably come

The Polish zloty extended its downslide as very weak industrial output data released on Friday brought about more dovish comments. This time, the dovish talk came from two otherwise hawkish MPC members (Glapinski and Hausner) who reassured the market that there would be a rate cut as soon as at the next NBP meeting in January.

Although the February (25 bps) rate cut had already been priced in, the forex markets responded to the dovish talk and the zloty slipped to fresh three-month lows. As concerns the NBP monetary policy in the short-run, it is evident that more easing will come, but the question remains how aggressive it will be. The market has currently priced in three more rate cuts (by 25 bps each), which is, in our view, not a realistic scenario. Even though we expect a very poor GDP reading for the last quarter of 2012, we still believe what our leading indicators for the Polish industry suggests, namely that this was the bottom of the recent economic slowdown. Hence, should the NBP act as a forward-looking central bank and our more bullish outlook for the Polish economy proves to be correct, the recent market expectations (regarding rate cuts) will not materialize.